I came across this paper, Learning the language of viral evolution and escape, and I immediately thought of William S. Burrough’s concept that language is a virus from outer space.
Which was turned into a lovely piece by Laurie Anderson with the same name.
The abstract from the paper is fascinating:
The ability for viruses to mutate and evade the human immune system and cause infection, called viral escape, remains an obstacle to antiviral and vaccine development. Understanding the complex rules that govern escape could inform therapeutic design. We modeled viral escape with machine learning algorithms originally developed for human natural language. We identified escape mutations as those that preserve viral infectivity but cause a virus to look different to the immune system, akin to word changes that preserve a sentence’s grammaticality but change its meaning. With this approach, language models of influenza hemagglutinin, HIV-1 envelope glycoprotein (HIV Env), and severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) Spike viral proteins can accurately predict structural escape patterns using sequence data alone. Our study represents a promising conceptual bridge between natural language and viral evolution.
So perhaps Burroughs (in 1962) and Anderson (in 1986) were really on to something that could change our thinking of viruses.
And as always, there are more questions than answers.
